My mother is a programmer, quite frankly the best programmer I have ever met. But she doesn't like computers and says she longs for the old days when she would write out her program on a piece of paper, hand it to the technicians and get a print out of the results a day later.
Windows. Although I doubt using a Mac would change her mind, even if I could convince her to switch.
It's kind of ironic, but she is completely like the clueless mothers everybody else complains about when it comes to technology. She needs help installing anything and I had to even set up her iPod for her.
However, she is a phenomenal programmer because of her logical thought processes. She never planned on becoming a programmer, she wanted to be a mathematician and that is what her degree is in. When she graduated, there was a position for an "applied mathematician" and she was hired. Applied mathematics turned out to be programming and so that's what she became.
My mum learnt to program in Autocode at the end of the Sixties, and went on to do scary embedded stuff in fighter jets; when she went back to work after having kids, she wound up doing crypto. Me? I do web stuff.
There's only one badass programmer in my family and it ain't me.
My mother was a programmer, she cut her teeth on a PDP-8 in high school. She met my father when they both worked at a database vendor in the early 80s, and they left together to found a PC software startup.
Her stepmother was a programmer too, who was an early employee of a mainframe time-sharing company that turned into a PC software company. When they were bought out by Intuit a few years ago, she was the president of the company!
Mine's not a programmer, but I once found a bunch of funny looking cards in our basement as a kid and I learned she used to work as a punchcard feeder. Maybe something rubbed off.
i've always been surprised how much like simple programming knitting and weaving and similar crafts are. most of my friends go WTF at my knitting because it's so incongruous with the rest of my interests, until i explain/show them how patterns read like loops and things :)
ravelry.com is a fantastic social network that has a db of patterns. they don't keep most of them on the site itself - just the fact that the pattern exists and where to find it, what kind of yarns are recommended along with what kind of needles, projects of the same pattern done by other members with however much information they care to include - although some designers do sell their patterns on the site. See http://img.skitch.com/20090509-fuy92fx7e5rykfgu377tgyg3wt.jp... for an example.
unfortunately, a lot of the nicer patterns are from print magazines, but there are some exceptions to the rule - knitty.com for one is all online. It's unfortunate more magazines don't sell their patterns online as well, because sometimes it becomes impossible to find the pattern when it's not been printed and you can't find anyone to sell it to you.
They seemed to sell quite a bit of shrink-wrapped software for designing knitting patterns and such on CD-ROMs a few years ago. Presumably that's moved to the web now?
No but she is the one who bought me dos sesame street games and taught me how to use them, as well as email in the early 90s and I'm sure I never would have used a computer other than as word processor and for email without her early start
